


What Happens In Hull

by wtb



Category: IT Crowd
Genre: Actual Paris, Douglas tries, French people, Gen, Party supplies, Spiritual quest, Tesco - every little helps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 09:22:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1092254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wtb/pseuds/wtb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Douglas wants April back, and he'll have to take a long hard look at himself first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Happens In Hull

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GeorgeEmerson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GeorgeEmerson/gifts).



> Dear Zaneetas, I want to thank you for this prompt. I had my eye on it even before the assignments went out, and when I got it I screeched at my friends with joy. Then, of course, I panicked. However! I love Douglas, I love what he had with April, and I love that I had this chance to do something for them. I really hope it answers to some of what you were after. 
> 
> The only other thing I wanted to add here was that, since this is a direct sequel to "The Speech", I ignored the very last episode of the series which unveils the fate of the internet. In some peripheral sense I guess that makes this an AU, but knowing the IT Crowd I suppose that's all right. Happy Yuletide!

***  
  
*** 

Douglas Reynholm stared at his Wall of Success with eyes narrowed, legs apart, and groin pointing in the direction of success.

His face on the magazine covers smiled back, but he didn’t feel he earned it. His rubbish bin was fuller than his sketchbook, and that thing was full indeed. What pages survived the anguished, manly tearing buckled with the weight of expensive business ink. Douglas didn’t care. He needed a solution and all he had was scratched-out notes and one rather good drawing of a horse with breasts. Unfortunately, he’d scratched that out too in a fit of pique. His genius was lost.

“Let’s try that again,” Douglas said. He was nothing if not persistent, as was proved by his small but growing collection of restraining orders. He lifted his pen and brought it down on the last remaining page, heavy with fate yet sharp with desperation and resolve. If this failed, he had six more blank sketchbooks in his drawer.

Douglas stared at his sketchbook with eyes narrowed, legs apart, and groin unmoved by this balance sheet. “Needs more woman!” he roared, and threw the book across the room where it promptly knocked out the man who’d poked his head in. “For God’s sake!”, Douglas said. “What do you want?”

“You wanted someone to look at your computer,” the man said, picking himself up from the floor and checking his glasses for damage. His tone was insolent but Douglas liked that in a man. Wait, no, he didn’t.

“No I didn’t,” he countered quickly. “Are you some kind of pervert?”

“I’m from IT,” the man spat back, and scrunched his face in disapproval. “Are you trying to get around the filters again?”

This took Douglas by surprise. He wasn’t sure what filters were, but he recovered quickly. “Coffee?”

“Just milk, please,” the man said, and settled himself at Douglas’ desk. “You do know I can’t let you do this, right? Last time I had to add one hundred and twenty-four websites to the blacklist, _manually_. Nobody even knew they existed! I mean, “cuffed-to-xxxmas-trees.com”? How does a woman even get into such a situation? And more than once?”

Douglas had no idea what this fellow was on about, sitting there shaking his head at the computer as if everything perplexed him - an attitude Douglas understood well - but he did like the idea of doing things manually to women. Women, yes… the word returned to him with a certain significance, but he wasn’t quite sure what that was. It held the key to his predicament with April, he knew, but how?

“... there should be a helpline for something that happens that often…”

 _More women_ , Douglas thought, refusing to be distracted. What if he brought another woman into the equation and, well, equated everything back to its optimum amount? He nodded to himself and set to work.

“... unless, of course, cuffed-to-xxxmas-trees.com _is_ the helpline, but I very much doubt its efficiency. The men in the advert took sixteen minutes and forty-six seconds before they even _started_ looking for the key. If I were the woman...”

Douglas cursed. He thought he had it, but now the balance shifted in favour of women, four to three. To be perfectly honest he saw no problem there, but April might object. Wait. Why did he care what she thought? The math was wrecking him enough. “Enough!”, Douglas cried.

“I couldn’t agree more,” the IT man said. “I disconnected your internet completely. It’s better for everyone.”

“Great,” Douglas said. “It better have enough rams for what I’m about to do to it.” He mimicked the thrust of the animal, ready to assert its dominion.

“I would be very surprised if it needed any more,” the man said, but Douglas closed the door on him. There had been a mounting sense of deja vu involving underwear and electric shocks, and he was glad to see it gone. He preferred his devices to give him a _positive_ vibe. So!

Time to fire up Accessories…

... and click on Calculator.

***  
  
*** 

By the end of the third day of being holed up in his office, Douglas had six bottles of wine, four pizzas, two epiphanies, one prolonged visit to the loo, and more knowledge of computers than he ever wanted.

“So _that’s_ how you send something to print!”

Putting trivia aside, though, he had his solution.

***  
  
*** 

A week of seductive, then pleading calls later, April stood in the doorway to his office. One hand clutched the knob - which gave Douglas a pretty good buzz over where things were bound to go - and the other was getting pale around a Reynholm Industries pen. He’d seen her happier than this, but then she’d had a similarly blank expression when he first demonstrated his electric sex pants, and they’d ironed that out quickly. He wondered if he should have perhaps gifted her a less cheap pen, and winced when it finally snapped.

“Are you mocking me?” she demanded. “Humiliating us both in A&E wasn’t enough for you?”

“What do you mean?” he said. His own recollection wasn’t the clearest, but then again he did get punched in the face repeatedly and rather impressively. Indeed, a good deal of his life was a blur after that, but he put it down to sorrow and ignored the calls from his doctor.

“Douglas,” April said in a hiss. “Look at yourself.”

“I have,” he said. “A lot.”

“You’re wearing make-up. _Badly._ And a... miniskirt…” She waved vaguely and turned her eyes to the ceiling. “I don’t even know if that pattern is legal. Or the length. And… and you stuck balloons up your shirt. _Why?_ ”

“I miss you,” he wept.

She shook her head. “What’s that got to do with -”

“ _Everything!_ ” The passion and the volume of his voice shut her up, so he carried on into a flashback. “I was lost without you, April. I wandered the streets like a man without direction. I pointed tourists to different places. Wrong places! I sent a small Belgian child to Sainsbury’s.”

April stammered. “I -”

“Do not interrupt me, woman!”

The flashback continued. “I was wrong: there was only Tesco. This child may be lost forever.”

Douglas paused, looked up, and met April’s eyes. She was struggling with words, just like he remembered her. Eventually she settled on “go on,” and he proceeded with his tale. “I feared the same would happen to me, but then my lawyers advised me to take some therapy. I told this doctor, who I’d never met before in my life, all about how you used to be a man -”

“That’s just great, Douglas.”

“- because I felt I could trust him. And do you know what he said, April?”

She threw her hands up. He strode over to her, lace knickers chafing slightly, and braced her by the shoulders. “He said I should try to understand you.”

April considered this. “Well, that’s -”

Douglas laughed. “I laughed,” he said. ““ _Understand a woman?_ ”, I said. “ _You’re fired!_ ” And I thought no more of it.”

She looked him up and down to indicate his _couture_. “And yet, this happened.”

“Yes!” he declared. “I thought no more of it, until some madman fiddled with my computer. He came here, ranting about Christmas trees, and he said we should all be women.”

“I see.”

“Tied to Christmas trees.”

“I’m leaving.”

“April! Wait!” He threw himself at her, and knocked them both down. One of his breasts popped. “Dammit!”

He grabbed at the other to make sure it was still fine. It squeaked a little under his reassuring squeeze, which reminded him fondly of a few of his ventures into the world of lovemaking. He patted himself down and felt himself up, but by the time he remembered what he was doing all this for in the first place, April was gone.

***  
  
*** 

It turned out there was more to being a woman than looking fabulous and eating crisps. Douglas was ready to give up by the time he reached the computer people, wobbling down the stairs in what felt like the seventh circle of hell. Who knew lifts weren't allowed to go underground?

Not that he’d ever show a crack in his resolve, of course; he strode into their office like Glenn Close in Basic Instinct, all power and attitude. He leaned against the doorframe in concession to his burning feet, crossed his arms, and nodded at the fellow with the answers. “ _You._ ”

The man halted his typing and froze, face stubbornly turned to the screen and only his eyes glancing to the side. One look at Douglas, and he was focused on the screen again. The other man, further in the back, held a mug to his face in a similarly frozen fashion, but its contents trickled in a steady line down his shirt.

“Yes, you,” Douglas told the peculiarly coiffed one. “I’ve become a woman. Now what? It’s not enough!”

The man in the back made a sound that Douglas could only classify as a tapir - being familiar with this noise due to a business incident back in '06 - and turned to his fellow swot. “ _You_ did this?”

The love guru refused to look at either of them. “I refuse to take responsibility for this, Roy!”

The squeaky one got agitated. “What did you _do_?”

“I unplugged his network cable!”

“ _Why?_ ”

“Shut up,” Douglas said. “You sound like you’ve been possessed by a Geordie ghost.”

There was silence.

Douglas rummaged around his shirt in the absence of pockets, and produced his chart. As he slammed it down on the wizard’s desk, a scrap of balloon floated down after it, and everyone ignored this so hard that Douglas could swear the lights dimmed. “I’ll find another one,” he said irritably. “Just help me get this woman back.”

The one in the back, Roy, piped up again. “The one who used to be a man?”

“ _Ohhhhhh!_ ”

Douglas turned to the bespectacled expert, who suddenly looked relieved. “So _that’s_ what’s going on!”

Roy leaned closer and hushed, cradling his cold and empty mug. “ _What’s_ going on?”

“Look,” his colleague said, lifting Douglas’ chart to display it like an auction item. “It’s basic logic.”

Roy gave him an earnest look, then moved his gaze to Douglas. “No it’s not.”

“For a man like Douglas Reynholm, Roy, there’s too much man in this chart.”

“Which explains everything,” Roy said.

“Precisely!”, Douglas agreed.

Roy blinked at him some more over the rim of his mug. “No it doesn’t. It explains nothing. Why are you -”

“Look, man!” Douglas said, squaring his shoulders and lifting his chin. His other breast fell out from under his shirt. “I have been on a long journey. It started with a sandwich from Tesco, which I ate. Before I knew it, I was telling a man I’d never met before all about myself, because I was threatened with removal from the company. I needed more women, so I did math. I printed something. And here I am!”

“To be fair, Roy,” his guide and ally said, “that probably _is_ the most work he’s ever done.”

“Say we help you,” Roy said, unmoved. “Will you hire Jen back?”

Douglas glared. “That woman wrecked the internet!”

“Actually, you sat on it. When you... and April… through the wall? Glass everywhere… remember?”

“I remember nothing.”

“There was a baby tearing up everyone’s papers. I’d say that’s pretty remarkable for a corporate meeting, wouldn’t you? No?” Roy looked to his colleague for help. “Moss?”

“That, and the fact that you sat on the internet,” Moss said. “Literally sat on it. We had to throw it out.”

“All right,” Douglas said. “We’ll do the wife swap. What do I do?”

Roy’s voice broke again. “Trousers. _Please_.”

***  
  
*** 

April eventually agreed to see him again, and a part of her conditions was that he should take her to Paris proper. They ended up in Hull again, but that was a new and exclusive restaurant that boasted a genuine British dining experience.

“The best of both worlds,” Douglas said by way of introduction.

“I’ll take that as praise,” April said. “I have to say, you certainly are persistent.”

“Am I ever,” Douglas readily agreed. “I have a small but growing collection of restrain-”

“I know,” she said. “I was tempted to add one to it.”

He leaned back and raised a glass of sparkling White Lightning. “What made you change your mind?”

“Your IT department was very... eloquent, shall we say. Really, that’s the best way I can describe it. They had a lot to say and very little of it made sense, even with the diagrams.” She swirled the Carlsberg in her glass. “Especially with the diagrams. Anyway, we bonded over the trauma of seeing you in your -”

“I tried, woman! I got tits! What more do you want?”

In truth, he missed them.

“You don’t have to _understand_ me, Douglas, never mind mimic me,” April said. “Just accept me. Besides, what you were trying to do would’ve made us lesbians, and I’m not -”

His spirits lifted. “Lesbians?”

“ _No._ ”

His spirits deflated faster than his unfortunate breast.

“Douglas,” she tried again, leaning closer and inviting him to do the same. “Your heart’s in the right place.” She paused. “I think. Either way, I’m willing to give this another go.”

Douglas beamed. “You know what they say,” he said, dangling a set of keys. “A room per hour and a -”

“Mr Reynholm?”

They both looked up, spell broken. The man who cockblocked them was a nondescript Frenchman in an official-looking suit with two of his clones in tow. All these Continentals looked the same. “Maybe?” Douglas offered.

“Monsieur, I’m with the Interpol. It would appear that, by way of confession, you sent out a copy of some highly fraudulent transactions to…” The man checked a letter he had with him. “To every printer on floors twelve to twenty-six of the Reynholm Industries building. Then you left the country.”

”I see,” Douglas said.

He squeezed April’s hand. Their eyes met.

Their fists flew in tandem.

***  
  
*** 

“Magnifique,” said a random diner to his wife, over the din of the growing brawl. “It truly is the full British experience.”

***  
  
*** 

“So, to recap,” Jen said afterwards, “Douglas was a woman, then he wasn’t, and now he’s back with April and they’re on the run?”

“Something like that,” Roy said.

“That’s actually remarkably accurate,” Moss said.

“Who cares,” Jen said. “I’m back. Oh, hey, balloon!”

She picked up the single and slightly sad item that had bounced up to her leg from wherever it had been hiding. “You guys do care,” she said with an admonishing smile. “I promise, I’ll hold it close to my heart.” And with that, she pressed it to her bosom.

Moss opened his mouth to say something, but Roy beat him to it with a grin. “Welcome back, Jen.”

***  
  
*** 


End file.
